The passing of Labor Day weekend traditionally meant, across much of North America, that pools closed, leaves began to fall, and kiddies donned new duds, hoisted new looseleaf notebooks into new backpacks, and clambered aboard the yellow bus for a new year of learning. As with so much else from the days of yore, though, from the superannuated memories of when I was doing that donning and hauling and clambering, that vision has to be refreshed: schools now run year-round, and if backpacks threaten ever more to inflict schoolchildren with scoliosis, education is becoming more and more a matter of pixels and electrons, less and less of type on a page and chalk on a board.

One technology embraces those different eras, and that’s the technology—added to the art—of filmmaking. In this series, we’ll visit a baker’s dozen films, recent and not so recent, that lend a view of the world of angst, acne, savage pecking orders, and hormonal confusion that is the life of the student. Sportos, motorheads, geeks, bloods, wastoids, dweebies—all are welcome at this filmic celebration of student life and all its travails, which, of course, are for most of us the happiest days of our lives. Plus ça change…

To get us in the spirit, here’s a snippet from that great educational—in more than one sense—film Goodbye, Mr. Chips, with Robert Donat and Greer Garson. There’s little angst and almost no savagery there, though, so steel yourself: There’s more to come, and some of it includes Rodney Dangerfield.